Hey there, it’s me again, your friendly neighborhood brand strategist. Here at Moxie Sozo, we often talk about what makes a strong brand, but today, we’re going to take it a step further: we’re going to show you how to ruin your brand completely.
Let’s face it: building and maintaining a brand just isn’t for everyone. For some, it takes too much time, money, intention and scary risk-taking. Who needs that?
If you love a good shortcut, then welcome to a little guide called “How to Ruin Your Brand”: A step-by-step process to ditching brand identity and embracing the simplicity of becoming a nameless company, without the hassle.
(Disclaimer: Moxie Sozo, its employees, and affiliates are not responsible for low margins, lack of brand recognition, or any other likely disaster that will befall your company as a result of destroying your brand. Apply these steps at your own risk.)
Step 1: F*ck the Future
Bold ideas are for posers and wannabes. Why go big when you can stay predictable? Customers aren’t dynamic people with changing needs. The business landscape is as great for you as it was 40 years ago. It’s not like there are white label store brands and hungry startups circling your profit share like wolves. Those are just scary stories made up by people who aren’t as smart as you are. Step 1 is simple: all you have to do is stay put. You’ll know you’re doing step 1 right when you:
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Let your current brand dictate your future brand. Stick with what’s always worked. You already know your customers love you forever and always, so why bother changing things?
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Don’t adapt to new audiences – the ones you have are good enough, and they’ll live forever.
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Whittle down new ideas to appease everyone (they’re never bold if everyone agrees by the end – hooray!).
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Rest on your laurels. Even better if you find ways to consistently brag about how many awards you’ve won.
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Chase trends for short-term cash and call it innovation. The more thoroughly you screw your future brand over with chaotic choices driven by quarterly balance sheets, the better.
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Witness a steady decline in your brand’s relevance, sales, profitability, and awareness – and enjoy the breeze on your way downhill. So relaxing.
Step 2: Hate Your Customers
Step 1 gets you started, but Step 2 is where your momentum really builds. You’re sick of hearing about how you need to empathize with your customer. You’re tired of having to lay down your opinions and bias to think about their needs every time a brand marketer steps in the room. Who has the time?! Step 2 is all about making your customers' problems their own. They can figure it out, and you’re tired of having to care. Pretending they don’t exist outside of tidy spreadsheets and homogenized portraits of who they should be is so much easier! Here are a few pointers on hating your customers well:
- Make strategic decisions based on how the company feels first, and the customer’s needs last.
- Call your customers personas, targets, shoppers, or segments, etc. but never call them people, or admit that they’re messy humans.
- Pummel them with “targeted” performance marketing spam on every platform known to man. (If Elon eventually invents ways to advertise to them in their sleep, definitely do it.)
- Make your website hard to shop.
- Make your packaging hard to find, and even harder to understand.
- Make everything about interacting with your company as salesy, stale, forced, boring, self-glorified, or impossible as you possibly can.
- Last but not least, don’t forget to patronize your customers. Act like you mean the world to them, because they clearly spend just as much time thinking about your company and product as you do.
Step 3: Climb New Heights of Delusion (aka Never Touch Grass)
Steps 1 and 2 will get you most of the way there, but you may still be prone to bouts of brand-building behavior. To protect yourself and your brand destruction effectively, step 3 is essential. You’ve got to scale mountains of delusion and reside there permanently. Don’t touch grass (like the Gen-Zs say). Or, as a terrible strategist once put it: “Oxygen depletion at the highest altitudes of corporate leadership appears to have excised the capacity for intelligent people to think critically.” This is essential. The more you remove yourself from reality and feed your myopic view of the world, the more protected you’ll be. Here are some of our favorite ways to carry out Step 3:
- Play it safe. Clearly, being radically bold and intentionally different in a homogenized, algorithm-driven world is NOT worth the risk. Who wants to trade in dollars for more dollars and keep competitors at bay? Dummies, that’s who.
- Spend more time waffling about the eyes of the illustrated fruit characters on your packaging than figuring out why your upstart competitors are stealing your market share (true story).
- Ditch authenticity and settle for mimicry. Hopping on every trend is a plus.
- Only look at the growth you have now, instead of the growth you want.
- Last but not least: Keep a homogeneous echo chamber of colleagues, employees, friends, and culture. Bonus if you go to Cannes every year.
Phew! We made it. If you’ve followed these steps, then congratulations, you’ve just successfully set the dominoes of brand destruction in full motion and are enjoying the plink, plink, plink of dropping market share and waning margins. So much better than risking longevity by pushing your brand past mediocrity, amiright? So sit back, relax, and enjoy your breezy ride to the land of red lines and complacency, sponsored by the fear of change and a good dose of myopia. You did it! You no longer have a brand to worry about.
(P.S.: Obviously this is snark. Thanks for indulging my strategist angst. If you’re not afraid of bold ideas that build successful brands, hit that contact button and let’s get the convo rolling. We’re honest but lovely, I promise.)
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